Introducing a new Julia, let me know if you like, dislike, etc......
One of the more disappointing parts of this gender war the PM seems to love stoking is the many voices that say things like ‘they wouldn’t treat her like that if she were a man’.
Like the Australian PM – but unlike most of the people holding forth on misogyny in Australia generally and this interview in particular – I have been interviewed by Howard Sattler. When he interviewed me, he was courteous, pleasant, and asked intelligent questions, despite the fact that some other media outlets had turned me into a hate figure.
There has been much discussion since the – I think we can all agree disastrous – launch of the ‘Women for Labor’ campaign about whether abortion should be back on the table again or not. This flowed from Gillard’s quote “Finally but very importantly, we don’t want to live in an Australia where abortion again becomes the political plaything of men who think they know better.”
I used to think the argument that Prime Minister Gillard has been excessively targeted for abuse was a pretty dubious proposition. I used to think that although there was clearly some elements of sexism amongst some of the criticism and abuse, you could easily find equivalents in, say, the casually anti-catholic nature of some of the criticism of Tony Abbott.
I’m not the first person to criticise the ALP’s clunky, tone deaf campaigning style. They are terrible at it, and we can all talk for hours about the reasons why. They’re so bad at it, that whenever they try, the conversation always turns into a meta-analysis of how badly they did it.
A few weeks ago the reality of systemic racism became obvious to more Australians. Now the Liberal Party offshoot in Queensland, the Liberal National Party, have highlighted the systemic sexism of our society.
